The Project

TransComp is a process-oriented longitudinal study which explores the development
of translation competence in 12 students of translation over a period of 3 years
and compares it to that of 10 professional translators. It was started in
October 2007 and is hoped to make an important contribution to the development
of the methodology and model building in process-oriented translation studies by
overcoming a number of shortcomings of previous studies. The insight into the
components which make up translation competence and into its development gained
in the project will be utilized for translation pedagogy and the improvement of
curricula for translator training. Developing more efficient methods of
translator training is a necessity which results from a shortening of degree
programmes in translation as a consequence of the Bologna process.

Selection criteria for the student subjects were very good or good grades in
German and English in their A-level reports and equivalent results in tests
which measure the subjects' ability for semantic differentiation and their
motivation. The subjects will all follow the same BA programme with German as
their mother tongue (A-language) and English as their B-language. The
professional translators selected have been earning their living as translators
for at least 10 years.

The translation competence of the 12 subjects will be analyzed at the beginning
of each of the 6 first semesters and at the end of the sixth semester of their
programme. At the times specified, the student subjects, who will be divided
into two groups, will translate a total number of 10 different texts from English into German
according to a specific scheme. Five of these texts will also be translated by
each of the 10 professional translators.

The texts to be translated offer a repertoire of different translation problems
(lexical, syntactical, pragmatic, textlinguistic, culture-specific,
creativity-demanding and comprehensibility-related problems). They will have to
be translated in Translog, which registers all key strokes, mouse clicks, and
the time intervals between them. To guarantee ecological validity, the subjects
may use the Internet and any electronic as well as conventional resources, whose
use will be registered by Camtasia Studio or observers (in the case of
conventional resources). Furthermore, eye-tracking equipment will be used in
some cases. During the experiment, the subjects will either have to think aloud
or have to comment on their translation processes retrospectively (immediate
retrospection). For these retrospections their screen recordings will be used as
prompts.

The verbal-report data will be transcribed using XML-markup; the transcripts will
also include the subjects' search activities. After the translation process,
retrospective interviews will be conducted with those subjects who had to think
aloud. The results will be triangulated, set in relation to the quality of their
translation products, and used to optimize refined versions of the translation
competence and the translation competence acquisition models of the PACTE group
(2003). All primary data obtained in the experiments will be made available to
the scientific community in an asset management system which is accessible from
this website.